Wow Question - For Cataclsym pre-orderer's only

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WBurchnall

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I'm thinking of buying an SSD. Mostly for gaming purposes. I previously had wow installed on a Seagate 7200.9? or .10? 500GB hd and it ran fairly-well. Usually, when in Dalaran there's a bit of lag when its initially loading the models but it would go away on my server (Tichondrius) after about 1-2 minutes of wondeirng around. Perhaps a bit worse during primetime.

I've seen some videos online showing wow loading on an sdd versus wow loading on a traditional platter-based hd. It seems for the most part the SSD makes a reasonable difference, IE some sample youtube comparison videos below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5I0QfxUrwc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-M-3-ejxPs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47dt-y27eYk

I've noticed the cost of 60GB SSDs too have dropped to around $110.00 which is cheaper than most of my video card upgrades and was thinking might give a similar performance boost? I suppose my question is how big will the World of Warcraft install be /w Cataclsym? I know Wow: Wotlk was nearly 10-20GB from my experience. Catacylsm adding another dvd should be at least 4-8GB more data?

I know there's a pre-order option for cataclsym from Battle.net that already-downloads the cataclsym data so when launch day hits on December 7th.... boom you can start playing at 12:01am. For anyone who has already pre-downloaded all of cataclsym, can you tell me what that brings your wow folder up to in size?

Would a 60GB be enough for Windows 7 + Wow:Cat + a few applications? Would I be better off buying 2-40GBS for $140.00 and using 1 for windows 7, 1 for wow? or 1-60GB for $110.00?
 
I personally would go for the larger option. 60GB will fit the 22 or so GB Cata and your Win7 install fine, but....


If you go back and reinstall from your Wrath DVD right now, you'll notice that at the start of wrath, the full install for the game was 10 or so gigs.

It has ballooned to exactly twice that since Wrath launched. Lord only knows how fast the space requirements will increase from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2. Go ahead and get as much space for your SSD's as you can. Save yourself the headache down the line.
 
Cipherr said:
I personally would go for the larger option. 60GB will fit the 22 or so GB Cata and your Win7 install fine, but....

...

If you go back and reinstall from your Wrath DVD right now, you'll notice that at the start of wrath, the full install for the game was 10 or so gigs..
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Hmm, seems like reasonable advice in regards to which size to choose. I agree that sizes will balloon over time for sure /w each new raid that comes out every 3-6 months or so. Probably more towards 6-9 months.

OOC, was that 22GB size mark you mentioned the actual installation of wow + the cataclsym pre-order downloaded or just a rough-guestimation?
 
SSD will give you a nice jump in places that hit the hard drive the most (Dalaran , Raiding and large scale PVP).

And since the old world will be pumped full of Worgen's and Goblins plus everyone wanting to level to 85 you'll probably be hitting the hard drive pretty hard to keep up with it.

For WoW the upgrade path (at least from what I've observed) CPU > GPU > RAM > SSD , also as a word of advice if you don't end up buying an SSD for Cat then just disable your mods (since they will all be likely broken at release anyway) and get a little extra performance that way.
 
Godmachine said:
SSD will give you a nice jump in places that hit the hard drive the most (Dalaran , Raiding and large scale PVP).

And since the old world will be pumped full of Worgen's and Goblins plus everyone wanting to level to 85 you'll probably be hitting the hard drive pretty hard to keep up with it.

For WoW the upgrade path (at least from what I've observed) CPU > GPU > RAM > SSD , also as a word of advice if you don't end up buying an SSD for Cat then just disable your mods (since they will all be likely broken at release anyway) and get a little extra performance that way.
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Agreed. At the moment, I have an iCore i7-920 running at 3.5Ghz and don't really want to waste the money to upgrade to a 950 since I don't think there would be that much of a performance enhancement. I was tempted to overclock it a bit further closer to the 4.0 Ghz range though. I have a 5870 for my GPU which I think should be enough power for wow and am planning to upgrade to a 6990 in Q1 2011. In the meantime though, I'll stick with a 1x5870. I have 12GB of DDR3 ram atm so ram wise I think I should be good in both speed and quantity. I don't think wow can even access more than 2-4GB due to os-limitations.

So I think the only area left to upgrade atm is the HD for SDD? At least until the next-generation of video cards are all released? I'm willing to consider the 580 if the 6990 turns out to be a dud but I can't possibly imagine a 6990 not vastly outperforming the 580 being a dual-gpu card.
 
WBurchnall said:
Agreed. At the moment, I have an iCore i7-920 running at 3.5Ghz and don't really want to waste the money to upgrade to a 950 since I don't think there would be that much of a performance enhancement. I was tempted to overclock it a bit further closer to the 4.0 Ghz range though. I have a 5870 for my GPU which I think should be enough power for wow and am planning to upgrade to a 6990 in Q1 2011. In the meantime though, I'll stick with a 1x5870. I have 12GB of DDR3 ram atm so ram wise I think I should be good in both speed and quantity. I don't think wow can even access more than 2-4GB due to os-limitations.

So I think the only area left to upgrade atm is the HD for SDD? At least until the next-generation of video cards are all released? I'm willing to consider the 580 if the 6990 turns out to be a dud but I can't possibly imagine a 6990 not vastly outperforming the 580 being a dual-gpu card.
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I would overclock that CPU to 4Ghz if you can get it stable , those extra clocks always help and its worth while to do. For everything else you're golden.

Yea an SSD is pretty much the last thing you could upgrade without considering dumping another 3 grand into super expensive parts. It does make a nice impact , even more so if you pay attention to how the game loads and caches information. If you do you'll see it speed through everything like a champ.

Just make sure you get a nice fast SSD , don't go for the budget crap that looks attractive cost wise. Intel makes great SSDs , Crucial has a pretty awesome one right now too. OCZ just put out a sweet drive that has some amazing write speeds.
 
Godmachine said:
I would overclock that CPU to 4Ghz if you can get it stable , those extra clocks always help and its worth while to do. For everything else you're golden.

Yea an SSD is pretty much the last thing you could upgrade without considering dumping another 3 grand into super expensive parts. It does make a nice impact , even more so if you pay attention to how the game loads and caches information. If you do you'll see it speed through everything like a champ.

Just make sure you get a nice fast SSD , don't go for the budget crap that looks attractive cost wise. Intel makes great SSDs , Crucial has a pretty awesome one right now too. OCZ just put out a sweet drive that has some amazing write speeds.
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I'm considering getting this just for WoW: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227542
 
Azureth said:
I'm considering getting this just for WoW: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227542
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I was thinking about that also. I noticed that the OCZ Vertex 2 Extended 60GB is also on sale for 109.99 after mail-in-rebate which made me stop and ponder which to go for.

Or for a small bit more, theres the option of two $70.00 40gb SSDs from Cosair's sandforce series also after MIR. In theory, you could setup raid 0 with those for better output/throughput. Althougth with raid 0 you'd have just 40GB of storage. Hence leading to my original question of how large is wow /w latest patches + cat update downloaded. There was a good point brought up that the wow installation size is only going to increase over time as content/raids are released. I just don't know what Cosairs performance/reliability is like.
 
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You'll need more then the absolute size to install wow, roughly another 10-15 gigs during the process. Some people in the beta are running into problems installing on smaller SSD's even tho they have enough 'total' room post install.
 
DarkStryke said:
You'll need more then the absolute size to install wow, roughly another 10-15 gigs during the process. Some people in the beta are running into problems installing on smaller SSD's even tho they have enough 'total' room post install.
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That's kind of lame but good to know. I guess I have no choice in that case but to pick the 60GB version. Thanks for the input DarkStryke
 
I have an 80gb intel g2 drive and with windows and WoW (a few other programs but nothing hogging space) and I have 21gb free. I plan to pick up one of the new intel drives that are supposed to be coming out to install more games on the SSD.

While the Sandforce drives might be a little quicker I love the Intel toolbox, remember you want to try and keep 5-10% of your SSD free.
 
fyi WoW needs double the upgrade patch space to extract everything before it does its install. So it might say you need 40GB for WoW, but it'll be about 45-50GB or more during install.
 
I guess one last question, is there any reason for someone in Canada to believe that the price of SSDs will drop partially or significantly anytime before now and December 7th? I imagine prices will remain pretty constant over the next 3 weeks? There's no super-good-3rd or 4th generation SSDs set to launch momentarily that'll drive down prices of current models and make me go 'Doh' as soon as I purchase?
 
WBurchnall said:
I guess one last question, is there any reason for someone in Canada to believe that the price of SSDs will drop partially or significantly anytime before now and December 7th? I imagine prices will remain pretty constant over the next 3 weeks? There's no super-good-3rd or 4th generation SSDs set to launch momentarily that'll drive down prices of current models and make me go 'Doh' as soon as I purchase?
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Not really , Intel was suppose to launch some around this time so you may want to hit up the hard drive sub forum here for info.
 
ValeX said:
Maybe install it first on a larger platter-based drive, then just drag and drop the folders to your SSD when finished. Wow installs are very portable! :)
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that's what i was thinking, would wow need to share the ssd with windows 7 in order to run faster? i figure just moving it to the ssd should be sufficient. i could be wrong though :p
 
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